"Totally coup, yo."

Bunting

Unless you were cloned in a lab, a series of highly improbable events led to your birth. Millions of sperm rushed to fertilize an egg inside your mother’s body. Only one of those would lead to your birth. And against all odds, fetal development continued until you were born. Unlike most pregnancies, your’s wasn’t terminated by natural causes, resulting in what we call a miscarriage. Just being able to take those first few breaths of air after birth is an opportunity so unlikely that it makes winning the lottery seem plausible. Me, I appreciate having beaten those odds. I embrace being alive.

Others don’t. Or at least, they can’t. They can’t because they’re dead. Dead like Andrew Breitbart.

Brian Dooley is the director of the Human Rights Defenders program at Human Rights First. He has worked with several Irish and international non-governmental organizations including Amnesty International and Public Citizen. In the early 1980s he defied the apartheid laws in South Africa by working as a community organizer and English teacher in a South African black township. Recently he was denied entry to Bahrain. We talk about the ongoing human rights crisis in that country and what can be done to stop it.

“We’ll talk later, my agent is on the other line for a role in a movie that hasn’t been made 135,000 times before.”

0-15:00 That guy from that French movie is in charge of a fantasy baseball team and he gets kicked out of the stadium for his “team” because it’s closed. Also, he’s drinking absinthe straight from the bottle and has puked over most of row D-23. After bailing him out, his buddy has an intervention and asks him if he wants to try managing his baseball team or something to help get his mind of drinking in empty stadiums by himself at night all the time. When he gets there he learns The Establishment of Baseball doesn’t care about whether or not the players can actually play baseball. They decide who gets on their team based solely on their blood types and astrological signs.

Last October there was a Halloween parade in central Pennsylvania where a guy named Ernie Perce dressed up as Zombie Mohammed, as one does. Talaag Elbayomy, an outraged local Muslim attacked him and Perce reported to incident to police in the area. They then arrested Elbayomy for harassment. This is pretty much what one would expect to happen. It’s sad that Elbayomy reacted in the way he did, but at least justice was served in the end. Right?

I first heard about Alex Jones during one of my first breaks home from college, catching up with a friend from high school. He went to college in Meadville, PA, at the same school which after one semester drove Trent Reznor into the happening nightlife of Cleveland and probably fueled his angst-based career for the next 20 years.

0-15:00 So there’s this conservative Christian family in the 50s or 60s and they found out their son just went and got a sex change operation. They have a neighborhood prayer meeting in the hopes she would go to Marcus Bachmann’s recovery center. Half a century later the other brother is all grown up and starts thinking about growing up with his brother / now sister. He gets all creeped out by it because he’s still a trans-phobic Christian asshole. So he drunk dials his dad and makes fun of his toupee.

Dave Silverman is the President of American Atheists. BEAST contributor and stand-up comic Joe Dixon joins in and we talk to him about atheism and some fun upcoming events for secular activists like the Reason Rally, which is March 24 in Washington, DC. Joe wonders aloud what Silverman’s penis looks like, and later Josh gets all reactionary and starts yelling about how atheism is a “choice.” Except not really.

Music is by Pigface and is used with permission. You can subscribe to the BEASTcast by using this link in iTunes or any other podcast subscription software.

“It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.” -Thomas Paine

Last weekend my Twitter timeline blew up when Kirk Cameron showed up at CPAC to lecture at the attendees about creationism and the worldwide mad deadly evolution conspiracy. But the mocking wasn’t coming from scientists or secular activists who work at keeping religion out of science classrooms. Those people tend to not show up at events like CPAC. No, it was coming pretty much exclusively from liberal political activist bloggers and journalists. And not only that, it was also exclusively coming from bloggers and journalists who, as far as I could tell, have never once written about biological evolution or the fallacies involved in creationist arguments. I speculated that most of them have never even opened a text on evolution before.

0-15:00 The movie opens with John Williams piloting a plane with his orchestra who he has kidnapped. The deal is that they have to keep playing that sappy music he likes so much or else he will crash the plane. You ever wondered how he managed to get so much soundtrack work? Now you know. So Williams is spying on this town which seems to exist only for the sake of a horse-driven economy. Most people’s lives revolve around buying and selling horses. No other commerce is permitted. One of these horses is called War Horse, and a family trains him to assassinate a member of Austrian royalty. War Horse is obviously a code name for Whitney Houston. The horse starts smoking rocks all day.

Archives

Warning: require_once(all_images/config.php) [function.require-once]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /nfs/c09/h03/mnt/134940/domains/buffalobeast.com/html/wp-content/themes/Beast/footer.php on line 28